Dissertation

The right to violence: Customary rights, moral economy, and ethnic conflict in seventeenth-century Virginia

Schmidt, Ethan A

2007

Overview

During the spring and summer of 1676, an army made up of servants, slaves, and poor Virginians attempted, according to their leader Nathaniel Bacon to, \"ruine and extirpate all Indians in Generall.\" According to one account, Bacon indiscriminately \"fell upon the Indians and killed some of them who were our best Friends.\" Nevertheless, Bacon and his followers encountered what might seem to many an unexpected adversary in their attempt to eradicate the Native American population of Virginia. The aristocratic leaders of the colony led by the Royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley branded Bacon and his followers as rebels, and attempted to apprehend him before he could achieve his genocidal aims. The ensuing four months of warfare between loyalist and rebel Virginians known as Bacon's Rebellion remained a particularly terrifying and potent memory for Virginians into the era of the American Revolution.1 Ninety-eight years after this violent class conflict, western Virginians once again armed themselves for war against the colony's Indigenous people. This time however, Lord Dunmore, the last Royal Governor of Virginia not only allowed westerners to violently wrest land from native people, but also actively encouraged it. Obviously, something had changed since Bacon's Rebellion. The right of Virginians of all classes to appropriate Indian land via the use of force seemed unquestioned by the time of Lord Dunmore's War in 1774. 2 The question of what brought about this change in Virginia constitutes the central historical problem this dissertation proposes to solve. I argue that what changed in Virginian attitudes regarding who could and could not employ violence against Native Americans rests not in the period between Bacon's Rebellion and Lord Dunmore's War, but rather in the seventeenth century. Specifically, Bacon's Rebellion represents the culmination of a process by which plebeian and middling Virginians successfully claimed a freeborn right to displace Native Americans with violence if necessary. Additionally, this process began not in Virginia, but in England. Therefore, I propose to trace the development of this process from its earliest roots in seventeenth century altercations over customary rights in England, to its culmination in Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. 1 Nathaniel Bacon, \"Manifesto Concerning the Present Troubles in Virginia,\" in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography , Vol. I (1894), pp. 55-58; Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), pp. 43; \"Commissioners' Narrative,\" in Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690 ed. Charles McLean Andrews (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1915), pp. 112. 2Ruben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, A Documentary History of Dunmore's War, 1774 (Madison, WI: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1905).ix-xxviii.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: American history / European history / Indigenous studies / Native American studies / Native North Americans / Native studies
• ISBN: 1109986394, 9781109986396